Roscoe Bartlett, defense lobbyist

Former Maryland Rep. Roscoe Bartlett has ventured out of his doomsday-proof West Virginia hideaway to lobby his old colleagues on Navy biofuels and other issues.

The 87-year-old Republican, who lost reelection in 2012 after his district lines were redrawn to favor Democratic candidates, was standing outside the House Armed Services Committee hearing room on Thursday, waiting to meet with Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.).

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Bartlett was there as an executive adviser for ATS, a government relations firm that handles energy and defense technology issues. It was his first trip to Congress on the company’s behalf, as he had to wait for his “cooling off” period to expire before he could come back to Capitol Hill as a lobbyist.

“I’m interested in some defense energy issues,” he told POLITICO.

The former senior Armed Services Committee member is pushing to ensure funding for certain parts of the Navy’s biofuels program in the National Defense Authorization Act for the next fiscal year, such as high-pressure gasification. The Navy has been investing in biofuels as a way to boost the nascent industry and to reduce its dependence on foreign oil.

The biofuels effort is controversial among Republicans, who’ve tried unsuccessfully in recent years to curtail the program. “You’re not the secretary of the energy, you’re secretary of the Navy,” a frustrated Rep. Randy Forbes of Virginia told Ray Mabus during a 2012 Armed Services hearing.

On Thursday, Bartlett urged his fellow Republicans to get behind the alternative energy source. “This is a technology that needs exploring,” said the futurist octogenarian, a far-right conservative on just about every issue but this one.

By his side for his first lobbying trip to Capitol Hill was his former chief of staff, Debbie Burrell, who’s worked with him since 1994 and is now a senior consultant at ATS.

“We didn’t even know some of the rules that we can still park around here, so we took a cab,” Burrell said, explaining that she’d just learned that former members of Congress maintain some parking privileges.

Since leaving Congress, Bartlett has split his time between Maryland and a 153-acre remote property in the mountains of West Virginia, where he’s built five cabins “with no phone service, no connection to outside power and no municipal plumbing,” according to a January profile in POLITICO Magazine.

During his time in Congress, Bartlett warned for years — to little avail — about the possibilities of devastating scenarios such as electromagnetic pulse attacks that could knock out the power grid for years.

“We’ve got to do something about it in Congress, but the urgent always takes priority over the important,” he told the magazine.